killtheweak
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2015–2025
9:44 · 9.6M views · Aug 19, 2009
A clip of George Carlin riffing on advertising and the nonsense around it, taken from a longer piece tied to the Zeitgeist movie.
Brought up as a comic touchstone in discussions of advertising, usually with a joke or a quick reference.
4 comments from Hacker News
George Carlin's skit is helpful here: this video It's just another ad. Advertising is mental cancer. Ignore it.
Just because advertising existed before, doesn't mean it has to continue to exist. Advertising is not a law of nature, it is a human invention and should be replaced by a new invention. Advertising is a very bad thing. It's a form of brainwashing in which people are manipulated or provoked to consume way beyond their needs. Its goal is to plant ideas into your head, without you even being aware of it. Curiously, the law of supply and demand in economics doesn't even mention the concept of advertising, yet it plays a huge role in demand creation. This 'inflated' demand provokes inflated supply, which creates even more demand (because everyone wants a popular thing), the feedback loop being limited by the speed of extraction of the natural resources and the capacity of the human body, but that can be augmented by increasing human population. There's too much shit produced in the world, too much waste created, too much useless information on the web and too many shitty websites and ecosystems, which exist solely due to advertising. I don't mind at all if they disappear or reduce in numbers. Good content and good products will find ways to survive. Bill Hicks [LINK] George Carlin this video
> in the land of the free which is not the land of no cost. Maybe it is exactly what that means, and we’ve just been interpreting it wrong all this time. this video > Free installation. Free admission, free appraisal, free alterations, free delivery, free estimates, free home trial, and free parking.
The whole "price lock" concept is a blatant marketing ploy in the first place. As always, "buyer beware" and read the fine print. "Certain exclusions may apply." this video